Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I just got back from a business trip to China, where I visited Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. I listened to and spoke a lot of Chinese, and while I can't yet get by in a business negotiation without occasional-to-frequent interpretation, I think my interpreter wouldn't have survived if I hadn't been able to get most of what people were saying on my own. Plus, I made a very good impression whenever I dropped some Mandarin. I can be proud of how much I can still converse in Chinese now, almost ten years after I stopped taking Chinese classes. (Thanks Skritter for maintaining my vocabulary all this time!)

But the real demonstration of my language skills was when a guy came up to me to hand me a flyer for a Chinese kung fu club that was just opening up. "Chinese gongfu! Very interesting!", he said.

“对不起，我没有时间。” Sorry, I don't have time.

After this basic response with good pronunciation, the guy was excited by my apparent comprehension, and redoubled his efforts. After a bit of conversation, I decided to tell him I was flying out tonight and so couldn't possibly come see the fight:

“我住在美国，在旧金山。我没有时间，我今天晚上要打飞机。“ I live in America, in San Francisco. I don't have time, tonight I'm going to get on a plane.

The guy seemed very confused at this point, so I just left. My colleague Lisa then burst out laughing, "You just made a BIG mistake!" Apparently even though you can 打车 ("hit car", or "take a cab"), you are supposed to 坐飞机 ("sit plane", or "take a plane"). If you try to 打飞机 ("hit plane"), that's something else entirely. So what I ended up saying was, I don't have time, tonight I'm going to masturbate.

Lisa laughed at me for at least five minutes.

This reminds me of the time as a second-year Chinese student I was trying to tell a joke during the department's Mid-Autumn Moon Festival about the policeman who was trying to catch a blonde, brunette, and redhead who had escaped from jail. "Catch, I know that word, like to catch a plane!" (I should really learn from my pattern of misusing plane-catching-related verbs.) Of course instead of 赶 (gǎn, "catch (a bus, plane, etc.)"), I used the wrong tone and said that the policeman wanted to 干 (gàn, "fuck") the blonde, brunette, and redhead. It fit just well enough for everyone in the Chinese department to assume I meant it, and the next day Ma Laoshi chewed me out for swearing!

Anyway, now I need to get a Chinese tutor, since if I try to do a business conversation in Chinese by myself, sooner or later I will confidently declare that our future partnership will be harmonious and erotic, or something equally hilarious. Or else I'll use language more appropriate for my toddler Max, with whom I currently speak most of my Chinese. I need to get all my egregious mistakes out of the way. Let me know if you know someone really good. I’m thinking something like one hour per week. Cost is no object. Mainland Mandarin focus, Beijing style (not southern). Remote okay, or in person in San Francisco.

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Watch out: I use "I" 54 times in this post, so this will be boring if you, like me, aren't interested in hearing me talk about myself.

When I was in high school, I was so shy that I couldn't talk to almost anyone outside my family. Through a last-ditch effort when I went to college, I got better. I then got lucky and succeeded at a lot of things I tried after that, which rescued my general confidence, and I did some focused practice, rejection therapy, public speaking, and Beeminding to fix my social confidence.

But even though I'm no longer afraid to try, that doesn't mean that I can do it well. I still feel that I'm not usually a good conversationalist. I haven't had enough practice, especially since I have always spent most of my working time hacking in my lair instead of working socially. I started to practice things like this after the CFAR workshop in March, but put it on hold after getting married when I hurt my feet.

I'm finally recovered and can go outdoors again, so I spent this week practicing: three days of the hallway track at some conferences (plus moderating a discussion), two group classes, a social lunch, a party, hosting my cofounders for hacking, and a few video calls. I'm not completely socially exhausted--yeah, I threw the "introvert" label out of my identity a while ago--but I'm also not going to the second party tonight.

So one day I saw links coming from Mandarin websites, initially i thought they were spam -- i have to spend several minutes everyday deleting such spam mail.

Today i checked my stats, and saw hundreds of real live visitors -- real human beings like you. So, hi, welcome! Sorry it took me till now to realise the truth, i welcome you to interact.

I thank the person who translated my articles :) I hope you stick around, even if English is not your first language. In addition, if there are any questions, feel free to drop me an email. All my best wishes to you. So glad you came!

（translated via translate.google.com and a reader-may be inaccurate，so i hope you get the general idea：)